WebCrow: A Web-Based System for Crossword Solving
(2005)

Language games represent one of the most fascinating challenges of research in artificial intelligence. In this paper we give an overview of WebCrow, a system that tackles crosswords using the Web as a knowledge base. This appears to be a novel approach with respect to the available literature. It is also the first solver for nonEnglish crosswords and it has been designed to be potentially multilingual. Although WebCrow has been implemented only in a preliminary version, it already displays very interesting results reaching the performance of a human beginner: crosswords that are “easy” for expert humans are solved, within competition time limits, with 80% of correct words and over 90% of correct letters. Introduction Crosswords are probably the most played language puzzles worldwide. Until recently, the research in artificial intelligence focused its interest only on the NP-complete crossword generation problem (Mazlack 1976) (Ginsberg et al. 1990) which can now be solved in a few seconds for reasonable dimensions (Ginsberg 1993). Conversely, problems like solving crosswords from clues have been defined as AI-complete (Littman 2000) and are extremely challenging for machines since there is no closedworld assumption and they require human-level knowledge. Interestingly, AI has nowadays the opportunity to exploit a stable nucleus of technology, such as search engines, information retrieval and machine learning techniques, that can enable computers to enfold with semantics real-life concepts. We will present here a software system, called WebCrow, whose major assumption is to attack crosswords making use of the Web as its primary source of knowledge, being this an extremely rich and self-updating repository of human knowledge1. This paper gives a general overview of the modules and the subproblems present in the project. Copyright c © 2005, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. 1The WebCrow project, with the emphasis on the power coming from searching the Web, was briefly described in the Nature magazine(News-Nature 2004) and mentioned in the AAAI Web site concerning games and puzzles http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/crosswd.html To the best of our knowledge the only significant attempt reported in the literature to tackle this problem is the Proverb system, which has reached human-like performances (Keim, Shazeer, & Littman 1999). Unlike Proverb, WebCrow does not possess any knowledge-specific expert module nor a crossword database of great dimensions. WebCrow, instead, in order to stress the generality of its knowledge and language-independence, has in its core a module performing a special form of question answering on the Web that we shall call clue-answering. The second goal of the system, that is filling the crossword grid with the best set of candidate answers, has been tackled as a Probabilistic-CSP. Italian crosswords are structurally similar to Americans, but they differ in two aspects: two-letter words2 are allowed and, more importantly, they contain stronger and more ambiguous references to socio-cultural and political topics. The latter is a phenomenon especially present in newspapers and it introduces an additional degree of complexity in crossword solving, since it requires the possession of a knowledge that is extremely broad, fresh and also robust to volunteer vagueness and ambiguity. Neologisms and compound words are often present. We have collected 685 examples of Italian crosswords. The majority was obtained from two sources: the main Italian crossword magazine La Settimana Enigmistica and the main on-line newspaper’s crossword section La Repubblica. 60 puzzles were randomly chosen to form the experimental test suite. The remaining part constituted a database of clue-answer pairs used as an aid in the answering process. In this paper the challenge of WebCrow is to solve Italian crosswords within a 15 minutes time limit (running the program on a common laptop), as in real competitions. The version of WebCrow that is discussed here is preliminary but it has already given very promising results. WebCrow averaged around 70% words correct and 80% letters correct in the overall test set. On the examples that expert players consider “easy” WebCrow performed with 80% words correct (100% in one case) and over 90% letters correct. Architectural overview WebCrow has been designed as a modular and data-driven system. Two are the main sources that it applies to: Web 2Name initials, acronyms, abbreviations or portions of a word.